The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson: review

James Walton marvels at an exuberant comedy of Jewishness, The Finkler
Question by Howard Jacobson

By James Walton

4:55PM BST 30 Jul 2010

Fans of Howard Jacobson might be alarmed to discover that the main character in his latest novel is a Gentile. As it turns out, though, they needn’t worry. Julian Treslove may not be Jewish, but in most other respects he’s a typical Jacobson protagonist: a middle-aged man much given to tears, self-interrogation, a sense of imminent doom, falling heavily in love and regarding his male friends as his male rivals. Above all, he’s obsessed with Jews and Jewishness.

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

When The Finkler Question begins, Julian, a failed BBC producer, has just had dinner with two of his oldest friends/rivals. His old schoolmate, Sam Finkler, is now an irritatingly successful populariser of philosophy and so Jewish that Julian privately thinks of Jews as “Finklers” (hence, among other things, the book’s title). Their former teacher, Libor Sevcik, is solidly kosher too – and locked in an endless argument with Finkler about the State of Israel: Libor’s for it, Finkler isn’t.

Then, on the way home, Julian is mugged by someone who, he later becomes convinced, used the words “you Jew” during the attack. So what if the attacker knows more than he does? What if he is – as he’s perhaps always wanted to be – Jewish too? Before long, he’s certainly giving it his best shot, brushing up on his Yiddish, wondering if it’s too late to get circumcised and moving in with a woman called Hephzibah Weizenbaum.

Not that he finds it easy to blend in with his “fellow” Finklers. For one thing, there’s their puzzling custom of telling jokes about themselves that they’d angrily resent from anyone else. (Luckily, this custom allows many of Jacobson’s own gags to be fearlessly tasteless.) For another, even he can’t really match their obsessiveness. After all, “you have to be born and brought up a Jew to see the hand of Jews in everything. That or be born and brought up a Nazi.”

Meanwhile, Finkler is on a very different trajectory. Appearing on Desert Island Discs (much, naturally, to Julian’s envious horror), he declares that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians makes him “profoundly ashamed”. As a result, he’s invited to join a group called “Ashamed Jews”, who meet regularly to debate, often rancorously, just how outraged they are by the Zionists.

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As this might suggest, The Finkler Question is quite a schematic novel, with the characters there primarily to embody the ideas that Jacobson wants to discuss. In a book never short of competing theories, plenty are put forward as to why Julian is so keen to be Jewish, but the main reason is surely just Jacobson’s desire to set up a bitterly comic contrast between him and all the real Jews who seem so keen not to be.

There’s also a full supporting cast representing every possible shade of Jewish opinion – and, while Jacobson tries to follow the approved fictional practice of presenting the conflicting viewpoints and leaving the reader to judge, it’s increasingly obvious which side he’s on. The Ashamed Jews get a merciless (but extremely funny) kicking throughout.

And just in case that’s not clear enough, the final sections deliver a series of fairly transparent author’s messages warning about the uncomfortably close links between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and savaging the glib parallels drawn by Israel’s critics between the Holocaust and the events in Gaza.

By the end, in fact, the urgency of these messages is so unavoidable as to create the sense of a book that changed its own idea of what it should be as it went along – as if Jacobson had gradually decided that, in such perilous Jewish times, some things are more important than turning in a well-ordered novel.

All this might have been more damaging if he wasn’t so good at the disordered kind. The spectacle of him letting rip remains as exhilarating as ever – and in any case, nobody will ever read his work for its decorous understatement. Jacobson has often said that one of his key writing mottoes is “More is more” and here again he sticks firmly to that principle (only more so).

For some writers a thorough investigation of the situation of British Jews today might do as the subject for a single book. In The Finkler Question it’s combined with his characteristically unsparing – but not unkindly – ruminations on love, ageing, death and grief. He also manages his customary – but not easy – trick of fusing all of the above with genuine comedy. And sentence by sentence, there are few writers who exhibit the same unawed respect for language or such a relentless commitment to re-examining even the most seemingly unobjectionable of received wisdoms.

No wonder that, as with most of Jacobson’s novels, you finish The Finkler Question feeling both faintly exhausted and richly entertained.